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  Crosstown Traffic - Jimi Hendrix...

  Charles Shaar Murray

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  Winner of the prestigious Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award, roots-savvy British critic Charles Shaar Murray assesses the lifework of guitarist Jimi Hendrix in the context of black musical tradition, social history, and the upheaval of the 1960s.

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  Menahem Pressler - Artistry in...

  William Brown

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  As soloist, master class teacher, and pianist of the world-renowned Beaux Arts Trio, Menahem Pressler can boast of four Grammy nominations, three honorary doctorates, more than 80 recordings, and lifetime achievement awards presented by France, Germany, and Israel. Former Pressler student William Brown traces the master's pianistic development through Rudiakov, Kestenberg, Vengerova, Casadesus, Petri, and Steuermann, blending techniques and traditions derived from Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, and J. S. Bach. Brown presents Pressler's approach to performance and teaching, including technical exercises, principles of relaxation and total body involvement, and images to guide the pianist's creativity toward expressive interpretation. Insights from the author's own lessons, interviews with Pressler, and recollections of more than 100 Pressler students from the past 50 years are gathered in this text. Measure-by-measure lessons on 23 piano masterworks by, among others, Bach, Bartók, Debussy, and Ravel as well as transcriptions of Pressler's fingerings, hand redistributions, practicing guidelines, musical scores, and master class performances are included.

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  The Lengthening War - The Great...

  Michael Good

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  The First World War was an event so important, so catalytic, so transformative that it still hangs in the public memory and still compels the Historians pen. It was a conflict which, by the end of the struggle, had created a world unfamiliar to the one in existence before it and brought levels of destruction and loss all too unimaginable to the generation of minds which created it. Despite this, we still find it hard to picture what it was like to live through this war. Right from its start, Mabel Goode realised that the First World War would be the biggest event to take place in her lifetime. Knowing this, she took to recording it, taking us day by day through what living in wartime Britain was like. The diary shows us how the war came to the Home Front, from enrolment, rationing, the collapse of domestic service and growth of war work, to Zeppelin attacks over Yorkshire, and the ever mounting casualty lists. Above all else, Mabels diary captures a growing disillusionment with a lengthening war, as the costs and the sacrifices mount. Starting with great excitement and expecting a short struggle, the entries gradually give way to a more critical tone, and eventually to total disengagement. The blank pages marked for 1917 and 1918 are almost as informative as the fearful excitement captured at the onset of that tremendous conflict. This is a strong narrative of the war, easy to read, mixing news with personal feelings and events (often revealing gap between official news and reality). Also included are several poems written by Mabel and a love story in the appendix, giving a complete insight into the life of the diarist. Of note is the fact that Mabel and her brothers (the main serving protagonists in the diary) lived in Germany for some time, meaning they could all speak German and knew 'the enemy nation' as many Britons did not.

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  Louise Nevelson - A Passionate Life

  Laurie Lisle

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  Louise Nevelson, one of the most important American sculptors of the twentieth century, was a beautiful woman who lived so audacious a life that by the time of her death she was a legend both inside and outside the art world.   Born Leah Berliawsky in Czarist Russia in 1899, she grew up in Maine, ostracized as a Jew and a foreigner. At twenty she escaped to Manhattan as Mrs. Charles Nevelson, eventually leaving her husband for a life devoted to art. She lived and loved with lusty abandon, often in poverty and obscurity, until she finally achieved fame and fortune at sixty. “This biography of a monstre sacre is a tale of hard-tacks heroism and heedless swipes at those who dared to love her,” said Interview magazine.   Nevelson found inspiration in cubism, primitive art, and her own unconscious, creating a rich iconography of images. With black, white, or gold paint and perfect placement, she transformed old pieces of wood picked up on the street into powerful sculptures.   In later years she appeared in mink eyelashes and flamboyant costumes, all the while going to her studio every day before dawn to add to the astonishing body of work now in collections of museums around the world.   Laurie Lisle interviewed Nevelson before the artist’s death in 1988, as well as her lovers, family members, artist friends, and many others. This biography provides fascinating insights and information discovered in archives and public records, letters and diaries, and the artist’s own prose and poetry.   Now in a revised e-book edition, Louise Nevelson: A Passionate Life is the only biography of this important American sculptor. It is “impressive in its thoroughness, which nonetheless results in ‘good reading’ by virtue of its interweaving of personal and professional information, its eclectic introduction of psychological analysis, and a phraseology that appreciates both the pain and the joy surrounding Nevelson’s eccentric behavior,” according to Woman’s Art Journal.

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  The Art of Death - Writing the...

  Edwidge Danticat

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  A moving reflection on a subject that touches us all, by the bestselling author of Claire of the Sea Light Edwidge Danticat's The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story is at once a personal account of her mother dying from cancer and a deeply considered reckoning with the ways that other writers have approached death in their own work. "Writing has been the primary way I have tried to make sense of my losses," Danticat notes in her introduction. "I have been writing about death for as long as I have been writing." The book moves outward from the shock of her mother's diagnosis and sifts through Danticat's writing life and personal history, all the while shifting fluidly from examples that range from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude to Toni Morrison's Sula. The narrative, which continually circles the many incarnations of death from individual to large-scale catastrophes, culminates in a beautiful, heartrending prayer in the voice of Danticat's mother. A moving tribute and a work of astute criticism, The Art of Death is a book that will profoundly alter all who encounter it.

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  Fit The Crime The Identity Lie

  Corinne Arrowood

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  It was his responsibility to fight for those who could not fight, punish those who needed punishing, and righting the world of all the wrongs—to Captain Vicarelli, that was his mission even out of the Corps. Once separated from the Marines, he took his mission to his home, New Orleans, rife with murder, rape, and crime. The Corps had trained him and trained him well. He was a skillful killing machine of unusual propensity. 
  There was nothing average about the man; he stood six-five and was a wall of powerful, rippling muscle. Honorably discharged, with unwritten speculation of PTSD from the psych community, the Marine pursued the life of a civilian. It wasn’t his fault that there was crime around every corner, but he took his mission to heart, protecting, punishing, and eliminating the threats. 
  Trinity was his one weakness. His entire essence craved her tight little body full of sexy energy. Her caramel-colored skin, waist-length black hair, and cat-like ebony eyes lit an unquenchable fire in his body and soul. If fate were a friend, she would be his woman one day. Night after night, he sat at the end of Louie’s Tap mahogany bar, sipping on his two-finger pour of Glenlivet and watching as she swayed to the background music while mixing libations for the clientele.

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